Preference Shapes Relevance: Cross-component Hierarchical Semantic Alignment for Personalized Generative Retrieval

Abstract:Generative Retrieval (GR) has emerged as a promising paradigm by mapping queries directly to Semantic IDs (SIDs) with powerful representation capabilities for candidate items. However, existing SIDs derived solely from item content create a semantic gap, failing to align dynamic query intents with static item representations. Furthermore, current generative paradigms rarely model user behavior sequences and are always bottlenecked by the high inference latency of beam-search autoregressive decoding. To address these challenges, we propose $\textbf{C}$ross-component $\textbf{H}$ierarchical semantic $\textbf{A}$lignment for $\textbf{P}$ersonalized generative retrieval ($\textbf{CHAP}$), a novel personalized GR framework from a hierarchical perspective. First, we design a Hierarchical Semantic Alignment module to align query's latent space with item's quantization path and synchronize multi-granular semantics. Second, we construct a personalized GR framework that models user behavior by synergizing discrete SIDs for structural guidance and continuous representations for fine-grained semantic refinement. Notably, we introduce a Residual Cascading Generation mechanism to restrict the costly multi-step Transformer Decoder to a single-pass inference, boosting inference throughput while mitigating information loss. Extensive experiments on three public datasets, one proprietary industrial dataset, and online A/B tests demonstrate CHAP's superiority, validating the effectiveness and practical value of our approach. The code is publicly available at this https URL.

Findings of EMNLP 2026. 22 pages, 10 figures, 7 tables

Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2608.30553 [cs.IR]

(or arXiv:2608.30553v1 [cs.IR] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.30553 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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